Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [86]
This is certainly true of the two great shrines in Sindh – Bhitshah and Sehwan Sharif. On visiting Sehwan, I couldn’t help grinning when I thought of the contrast between the prevailing physical atmosphere and the would-be spiritual atmosphere (one of unutterable official pomposity) which breathed from the booklet about the shrine and its saint, full of pious phrases from ministers, that I had been given by the local government.
Sehwan Sharif is situated on the right bank of the Indus in central Sindh and, like Hadda, is associated with some legends derived from Hindu river worship. A village of low-caste Hindus still exists nearby. Sehwan’s founding saint was Shaikh Syed Usman Marwandi (1177 – 1274), a Persian known as Lal Shahbaz (the Red Falcon) Qalandar, having – according to legend – once turned himself into a falcon to rescue his friend and fellowsaint, Baba Farid of Pakpattan, from execution. Most of the leading saints of Sindh, including Shah Abdul Latif, were from the tradition Lal Shahbaz Qalandar founded. Politicians take good care to honour the saint, and the golden gates of his shrine were donated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
The first thing that strikes you on approaching Sehwan Sharif (or in my case looking down on it from the guest house where the local government had kindly housed me, situated castle-like on a nearby hill) is the fairground atmosphere. The shrines of the saint and his leading disciples, and many of the streets between them, are lit by thousands and thousands of coloured fairy-lights. The carnival continues in the streets themselves, which are a sort of bazaar-apotheosis – that is to say, a normal South Asian bazaar, but with more of everything: more music, more light, more crowds, more smells (attractive and otherwise), more religious charms and souvenirs, more beggars and more thieves. Twice in the course of my visit I felt a hand steal into one of my pockets, where I had taken good care not to put my wallet or documents.
So in some ways Sehwan is Pakistan- (or India-) plus. Another aspect of this and other shrines however is very different indeed from the normal life of Pakistan, but helps explain the shrines’ popularity and social role: the behaviour of women. In Sehwan, groups of ordinary women pilgrims stride around with extraordinary (for Pakistan) freedom and self-confidence, unaccompanied by their menfolk though often with small children in tow. They even smile at you – without, I hasten to add, being prostitutes, though female and male prostitution is said to flourish around some of the shrines.
The tomb of the saint is surrounded by family groups of women and children praying and chatting. In the courtyard, where the drumming and dancing in honour of the saint takes place, one section is roped off (but not screened) for women. On the evening when I visited the shrine, most of the women were sitting quite decorously with their dupattas (scarves) pulled over their hair, chanting softly and moving their heads gently to and fro in time to the music. In the middle of them, however, three women were swaying and shaking their heads feverishly like maenads, with unbound hair flying around their faces – most probably some of the psychologically troubled people (women especially) for whom the shrines provide a real if questionable therapy.
The rest of the courtyard is packed with dancing, swaying men. At intervals, servants of the shrine force their way through the crowd spraying scented water to cool people down, but the heat is indescribable and the dancers drenched in sweat. In the middle